It's Never Too Late: 8 Comedy Late Bloomers

[TMC]

http://splitsider.com/2012/09/its-ne...late-bloomers/

Larry David
Of course, everyone knows who Larry David is today. While his career since the creation of Seinfeld has been pretty, pretty, pretty good (Listen, you try writing about Larry David and not use that phrase — it’s impossible, I tell you, impossible!), his career pre-Seinfeld was a little different.

David started stand-up in the late 70’s, right before the big comedy boom, but despite being loved by his comedic peers, found himself having a hard time connecting with audiences. While this may seem rather impossible to viewers who saw what is one of the only documents of David’s stand-up act on the one hour television special that would serve as a back door pilot to Curb Your Enthusiasm (the special had the same name and revolved around the conceit that Larry was starring in a documentary chronicling his return to stand-up comedy, which ends-as viewers might expect- disastrously) in which Larry deals with the good things about Hitler (he didn’t take **** from magicians) and whether one has more freedom being a married man in America or a single man in China (the single man wins), David notoriously walked onstage for one moment and, after instantly dismissing the audience, walked right back off stage.

Perhaps stand-up was not quite the right venue for him, but he soon found that writing was. Hired to work on the ill-fated sketch show, Fridays, David wrote sketches and was a cast regular. Unfortunately his follow-up to that gig found him writing for a notoriously disastrous season for Saturday Night Live in which he got only one sketch on the air. David wasn’t sure what he was going to do next and struggled for a couple of more years as a stand-up before he and Jerry Seinfeld wrote a pilot called The Seinfeld Chronicles. This, of course, later became just Seinfeld, and at the age of 42, Larry David finally found himself in a successful career, whether he wanted it or not.